Cryptosat Sends Message From Space To Help Scale Ethereum

Cryptosat, a team of Stanford University academics building satellite-based blockchain nodes, has participated in Ethereum’s KZG ceremony by signing a file from space.

“To ensure the KZG scheme can be used reliably, it is imperative that its public parameters are generated securely,” Cryposat said. “Crypto sat is using its isolated trusted execution environment to feed randomness harvested in space.”

The KZG ceremony will pave the way for Ethereum’s future EIP-4844 upgrade, also known as proto-danksharding. According to the Ethereum Foundation, the upgrade requires a new cryptographic scheme called KZG commitments.

Ceremony participants contribute randomized data files to generate a “structured reference string (SRS),” which is required for KZG commitments to work.

“Each contributor creates a secret and runs a computation to mix in with previous contributions,” the Ethereum Foundation said. “The output is made public and passed to the next contributor… the final output of the ceremony will be included in a future upgrade to help scale the Ethereum network.”

The KZG ceremony opened to public contributions in January for nearly two months, and is currently in a “special contribution period” showcasing elaborate entries which received grant funding. These include a recorded theater production and the controlled use of explosives. The ceremony has received 83,328 submissions so far.

Proto-Danksharding and Layer 2 Scalability

Ethereum researchers say that EIP-4844 will significantly reduce the costs associated with transacting on Layer 2 networks by replacing calldata with “blobs,” which are much cheaper for the network to process.

Researchers expect that proto-danksharding will increase the blockspace and throughput of Layer 2 rollups by roughly 100 times. Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder and chief scientist, has said proto-danksharding offers “large scalability gains” because blobs do not compete with existing Ethereum transactions.

In a recent appearance on The Defiant Podcast, Carl Beekhuizen of the Ethereum Foundation said the cost of storing data on-chain is the primary bottleneck restricting the scalability gains on Layer 2.

“If you scale to thousands and thousands of transactions, then all of a sudden it costs a lot just to…store this data,” Beekhuizen said. “The idea behind danksharding and EIP-4844 is to provide really cheap data storage… so the L2s can provide cheap transactions to their users.”

Once EIP-4844 takes effect, the Ethereum network will also begin deleting historical transaction data after 30 days, with infrastructure providers like the Etherscan block explorer expected to take on the responsibility of storing older data.

“The purpose of the Ethereum consensus protocol is not to guarantee storage of all historical data forever,” Buterin said. “Rather, the purpose is to provide a highly secure real-time bulletin board, and leave room for other decentralized protocols to do longer-term storage.”